Saved game files are not written to disk

[Richard42]

I have a problem with my Amiga gaming setup.  I have an A1200 with an accelerator/RAM board and 2GB internal CompactFlash card with CF-->IDE adapter.  I have noticed this problem with King's Quest 3 and 4.  The problem is that the game writes some files to the disk for the saved games.  I can quit out of the game (F10) and look in the "data" directory to see that the files are there.  But sometimes when I shut off the computer and re-start it later, the files are gone.

With KQ3 I was able to narrow down the problem a bit more.  If a savegame slot was written for the first time, then it was correctly stored to disk.  But if a slot was over-written, the data did not get written to disk.

This seems like a more general problem with the OS.  I tried moving all of the saved game files out of the data folder under KQ4 and putting them on the desktop.  But when I started the game, it found all of the saved files as if I hadn't moved them at all.

Can somebody help with this?  It seems to be a caching issue.  Some part of the system (OS?  disk drivers?) is caching these file operations but not flushing the cache back to the hardware.

[paul1981]

Is this running through WHDLoad?

[Richard42]

Is this running through WHDLoad?

Sorry I forgot to mention, but this is running under WHDLoad.  I forget the version; I bought it about a year ago.

[paul1981]

Sorry I forgot to mention, but this is running under WHDLoad.  I forget the version; I bought it about a year ago.

First of all, download and install the latest WHDLoad.  As long as you have your keyfile it will still work with the latest version.
Secondly, see if there's updated installs for the particular games you're having problems with.

[Richard42]

I am running version 17.0.4846 of WHDLoad, which appears to be current, and the v1.1 of the KQ4 loader, which also seems to be the latest.

It seems more like a system problem.  Why did the game still see all 4 savestate files even after I moved them to the desktop?

[ChaosLord]

It sounds to me like you are using PFS3 Filesystem or SFS filesystem and u r resetting your Amiga too fast before the filesystem cache flushes itself.

What filesystem are you using?

Trying playing the game and then wait at least 60 seconds after quitting the game before resetting or powering down.

If that does not fix the problem then its probably a WHDLoad bug.

[mailman]

With KQ3 I was able to narrow down the problem a bit more.  If a savegame slot was written for the first time, then it was correctly stored to disk.  But if a slot was over-written, the data did not get written to disk.

Are you sure you quit the game using WHDLoad assigned key when the over-writting occured? Many people make the mistake and quit the game by reseting the machine.

[Richard42]

I do always use F10/PrtScrn/*/whatever to exit out of the game.

I'm not sure what the filesystem type is; it was already formatted when I bought the CF card and IDE adapter off of ebay.  Can you tell me how to find out the filesystem type?

[paul1981]

It seems more like a system problem.  Why did the game still see all 4 savestate files even after I moved them to the desktop?

What do you mean by "move to the desktop"?  The Amiga Workbench doesn't store files on the desktop.  You can 'Leave Out' files (that have an icon) from the Icons menu in Workbench -  but this doesn't move the file at all, it just makes the file appear to be on the desktop, when in reality it hasn't moved anywhere at all.  That's why your savestates are still being read.
You use the 'Put away' from the Icons menu to undo the affect of 'Leave out'.

If you want to see this for yourself just open a shell and type "dir sys:", then drag some of the drawers like Utilities, Devs, System over to the desktop, or select the drawers and select 'Leave out' from the Icons menu. Then do another "dir sys:" and you'll see that the drawers haven't moved anywhere. Even simpler, open Multiview and browse the directory where you have 'Left out' files or drawers and you'll see that they haven't moved at all.

In addition, just by dragging a file to the desktop from a drawer (your savestates for instance) doesn't mean that the file is left out permanently, because if you reboot you will find that the files will return to where they came from (not that they ever left).  You must use 'Leave out' if you require a permanent shortcut.

If you want to know how Workbench stores these 'shortcuts', then look no further that the tiny .backdrop file on each drive.
You can see this file from the shell for instance by typing "list sys:" or "dir sys:".

Hope this helps.

[desiv]

Silly question but is your WHDLoad key being read properly?
I seem to remember there being problems with save games with the unregistered (or with the keys floating around) WHDload...

desiv

[Richard42]

Thanks again for the replies.  I'm sure that it's loading the key properly because I see my name on the splash screen.  I played with this again on Thursday night and didn't observe the problem.  I used the command prompt and the 'list' command to look at the timestamps of the files in the 'data' directory.  I found that these 4 files are actually floppy disk images, not savegame files.  I could see that disk 1 gets updated after I played the game, saved the progress, and quit.  I left the amiga running for much longer before I shut it down.  So maybe the problem was just that I shut off the machine too fast after exiting the game.  I'll see how it goes and post again if I run into this problem again.